weave4fun

i'm making a scarf for my friend cherie's birthday (which was on monday, better late than never). not having access to a loom was driving me mental, so i borrowed this off Drew the WeaveTech at college. it's the spit of my old table loom isn't it? except it doesn't have turning wheels at the left-hand side, so the let-off is a bit more difficult, and the ratchet n pauls are wooden, not metal. it might be a little wider as well, and this scarf is a little narrower than usual yeah i know, another bog-standard 2/2 twill. i must admit after 2 years of making 2/2 twills it is starting to get a little boring, but next semester i get access to dobby looms, so lucky me eh? about time too, i've been getting right impatient doing all this other stuff that isn't weaving. though using a domestic knitting machine is kinda fun, i must admit, i should try making a jumper. don't really have time just now, i'm overloadd with work and i've been ill, having caught

have been for 4 weeks oh, it's terribly overwhelming actually, i haven't been in proper education for years and years and i'm getting so much howework to do. we have 2 full days of knitting machining on monday and tuesday, which is pretty greuling like, and i spend a lot of time swearing at the machines cos they're awfully finickity things and they drop stitches at the slightest provocation, at least they do for me anyway. and then on wednesday i've been having to paint, and i can't paint to save my life. never mind. we're onto pattern cutting and sewing now and that's much better. we don't have weave for another few months yet though, so i've got the lend of a table loom off the weave techinician and gonna make a scarf for my friend's birthday. hooray! anyway, sorry for the extended absence, which reminds me of a joke man goes to the doctor man: i've got a problem doctor, it's a bit embarassing to tell truth doctor: well, there's

Well, i still don't have my camera lead, and i still don't have internet access at home, but it's been almost a month since i did the course, which was fairly significant and i might as well post something or i'll never get round to it. unfortunately, no pictures. heyho but like i say, i taught a Knotted Pile Weaving course at Castlehill Heritage Centre in Castletown, about 2 days before i moved down here to gala. It was a great success i thought. basically, everyone got a square frame with a warp of rug wool already on it, because i figured we could lose two hours putting warps on frames because it's terribly fiddly and takes a while to get right, and anyway it's something that anyone can figure out how to do themselves in their own free time, so i did it myself the night before. Really, it's quite a simple technique and once people have done a line or two of pile, it becomes quite automatic and folks can start messing about with their patterns and experime

i haven't been posting recently because i left the USB lead for my camera up north in a box within a box. silly of me i'll get pictures of the workshop as Castlehill up on monday when i get all my tat back down here. in other news, there's lots of lovely forests down here, and the job market is absolutely dire. -andrew

sorry for the caps that's me rationalising my tat in my parents' front room, they're away on holiday in Foreign the now. I just salvaged the wool from an unfinished rug that went wrong half a year ago. hooray! i'm getting on the train in 5 days, yikes. and doing the workshop in castlehill on saturday, jings, crivens, and so on. That's the garden there, descending into chaos through a process of entropy whereby all systems gradually collapse when they're not constantly maintained. i apologise for the sideways pics making your eyes bleed i include these two pics cos about 30 minutes later (it was dead sunny when i took them) a storm broke over holborn head and it was all thunder and lightning, fork lightning and everything, i've literally never seen anything like it. i was round the corner at my neighbour's house drinking tea and i ran back to get my camera and shut the door and the storm broke over me and i got soaked up to the waist running through sudde

my house is almost empty now. i have no looms. so i'm weaving on a frame. you could say i've got piles. knotted piles. sounds painful doesn't it? i'm practicing on the little frame before i make something on the big frame. i want to make a big square piece out of two length sewn together, for sitting around on the ground on. i haven't done any weaving for a while and it's nice to do something simple, with equipment that anybody can get hold of. i won't be able to keep a loom in my new house cos it's tiny, so i have to learn how to weave this way. i think one could make quite substantial rugs by sewing strips together. we'll see. -andrew

The one with the green is going for £50 The one with the lamp thing is going for £30 cos the end-finishing is cruder and i don't know what the design's all about These have a lovely feel to them, as the base fabric is 100% wool. They're very soft and pliable. I'll have some larger mats ready for next month. then i'm going to get on with making a few hammocks. I'm bored of making scarves just now oh, as it goes, does anyone here have any suggestions/examples of a good way to roll a blog and a shop up together into one package? I don't really have time to learn to do a load of new programming, so it has to be fairly simple. I'm sure i could create paypal, ebay, folksey (what's that american one called, i can't remember) accounts and so on and link to them from one central place, but it seems somewhat inelegant. It makes more sense to try to encourage people to buy in one place rather than having myself scattered over 10 different auctions. i could

but that's what it makes me think of. the little bit at the top is supposed to be a candle flame or something, but it looks more like a little upside down cross. it was going to be a boring experiment in circles, but then i got bored. then it was going to be a question mark containing the eye of horus. then i decided i couldn't be bothered thinking that hard. so there you go this is 5epi, which gives me 2.5 knots per inch. the knots are slightly wider than they are tall. i think if i cram the warp a little bit more, say 8epi, then it might get close to square, which is my goal, so i can plan pictures on a square grid and work from that. the red stuff is New Fez rug wool from texere. the brown and the white stuff are both berber rug wool from the same company. i'm interested in where it's sourced from (north africa maybe, being berber wool, bit obvious really). it's not the most consistent yarn i've ever used, but i like it nevertheless. it's rug yarn obvious

Is very time consuming, but i do enjoy it. you get a very satisfying, tactile, squeezy thing. this all happening in my new decluttered front bedroom which is now a combination loom, art, computer and tea-drinking room. on the left there you may notice a fuzzy thing on a red box. it's not a 2 dimensional caterpillar, but just a wee initial mucking about with the pile thing. this box isn't perfect for the task given, as you may notice that, apart from the picture being 90 degrees of rotation from true, the sides of the box aren't straight at the bottom. and there's no elegant way around that. i could also use the recycling box from the council, but then i wouldn't have anything to leave my recycling to gather dust and spiders for months on end in. and wouldn't that be awful. the other thought that this gave me was that if you treated the rectangular plastic box as the basic unit of tat storage when travelling, then you've always got a loom handy, cos you carry

Well, it's been a little while. this is only a narrow warp really. have to do sums to figure out how many ends there are. damn, i've forgotten long multiplication. 16 x 24 = 384 ends i am a slave to the calculator on my phone. in much the same way i am a slave to my lighter. through intellectual and physical laziness i'm using some of the stuff i got from those folks down south. i just thought to make stripes of blue and green seperated by fine lines of yellow, and i got this when i wove with even picks-to-ends pretty chuffed i reckon. this is a good long warp though, and i really have very little of the blue left. maybe not even enough to make one full scarf length in this style. i'm not really sure if i have that much green either to be honest. the only of those colours i have a lot of is the yellow and using yellow as a dominant weft in this fabric would be a bloody awful idea i reckon. i probably have some other yarns that are "close enough" so never mind.

i'm having a bit of fun, making samples for curtains. i figure it's nice for the sun to shine through, as these aren't insulation curtains, but decorative curtains. the sett here is 8, 16 and 32 epi. the weave looks most even in the 16 epi sections, with the 32 epi sections having quite a steep diagonal twill line. the thing is, na dmany of you will no doubt have come across this, that if one gives it a firm beat, it tends to beat the whole weft right down to the fell, causing a waving fell, with the close-sett sections pushing themselves forward. quite a hideous effect in my opinion. so one needs to keep a very light beat, that only press the weft down the fell on the close sett without putting any pressure on the loose-sett sections. it's not easy is it? the changing of beat isn't particularly noticeable in 32 and 16 epi stripes, but in the middle it's very noticeable. with groups of weft threads bunching together, giving quite a variation. i don't think i

before i start . . i've got internet at home! yay! i finally bit the bullet and paid BT £122 to connect my line. anyway, back to the point this is related to the 100-scarf a week project. yes! that's right! i have not given up! i am just slow as all funk! so, yeaah. here's the thing. say each scarf is 1.25 metres long. then if i want to weave 100 scarves at 2 wide i need to make a warp, say 70 metres long. a little bit more maybe to be on the safe side. as you can see, if i weave at 2 wide, then i can't really reasonably expect to make 100 scarves in a week. cos weaving the count of yarn i like to use at 1 metre an hour is reaonably hard work. and 70 hours reasonably hard work in a week quickly becomes extremely hard hard work. so i need to weave 3 wide, which would leave me at about 40 metres or so. i need to do more sums. but that's about right. and that's doable. i reckon. but i don't have enough heddles. yet anyway, that's another story. the main thr

so, i've suffered a great deal of disruption this month, what with fate snatching me away from my cosy bed and taking me to bolton via inverness, lanark and edinburgh. so i haven't actually got very much done in terms of physical productivity or sampling. i did do a day lesson for joan the other saturday, which was nice, and she's now got the table loom i've been using for the last three years. it's a community loom like i say, so it's there for people to use. and i'm arranging for castletown heritage centre, which is trying to develop itself as a traditional crafts place, to take on my smaller (Dryad) floor loom. i have also arranged for me to be doing a knotted pile weaving class there in july. which isn't that far away, really. and no doubt the idle (with any luck) summer will just speed on by like a fast thing, say a train. or a car on the motorway. anyway, i have spent the week tidying the house. i spent about half a day doing the dishes and the rec

there is a loom in the lake district that is in danger of being chopped into firewood. for reasons that are too long-winded to go into on a wee 15-minute net sesh, i find myself in the central belt of scotland about to take a trip to greater manchester and back. there was a dobby loom in the same location, and i was considering running over to rescue the box and reeds, but somebody has bought the loom as a One. there's still another loom though, a 4 shaft counterbalance by the look of things, tho was unsure from my phone conversation. but it has a beater bar, with fly shuttle. and i'm starting to think that it might be worth my time doing it on foot, just to rescue the beater bar, shafts, back and cloth beams, pullets, ratchets and all that. i would feel awful taking a saw to a loom to cut off the useful parts, but i guess it's no different from taking the good components form a messed up old car that's gonna be scrapped i don't want to break it into bits, but if it

i'm going to weave it in a 2/2 basket weave twill on the table loom. i can't figure out how to turn the picture round on this computer. i really hsould prepare these posts at home before i go out.

hooray! I taught my first person to weave on a loom today! It's the lady who taught me to spin, Anne, and she's got this wee Kromski Rigid Heddle loom, with a stand and all that she got at woolfest. it's quite a pretty wee loom, very nicely made, and it's got a warping frame built into it with the removable pegs and all that. the ratchet mechanism is not very good though. never mind. anyway, i managed to make a right hipse of the warping demonstration, doing everything back to front and that. but we eventually got a wee warp onto it with some disposable machine-knitting cotton and started getting some checks woven up. it doesn't seem to work too well with the stand as it goes, i don't think it's that stable. but it's cool, cos you can just lean it against the edge of a table. used to do that with my table loom actually, but it's uncomfortable cos it's heavy. anyhow, yeah, wow. i am so incredibly bad at explaining things, it's completely unrea

Hi there. I know i haven't had much of substance to say recently, but i haven't been idle. Oh no. You've seen the green and white scarves from a previous post maybe, and perhaps you've also seen in my last post a tri-colour scarf shot on the loom from a curious angle. I was originally going to call that series of scarves "Accidentally Irish" because i didn't realise till the warp was on the raddle that it was basically an irish tri-colour, and thus something you can't wear or sell in certain parts of Northern Ireland or the Central Belt if you're an excessively careful sort like me. Now, I am developing with this a scarf that can be woven inexpensively. In the first warp i left 5 inches between scarves for twisted fringes. And that's all well and good, and terribly nice, but it took me ages to twist the fringes up for finishing. So i scrapped twisted fringes in the name of efficiency. In the second, Accidentally Irish, warp I decided to leave h

i opened the sett on the outside of the latest batch of scarves. it occured to me while in a state of mild inebriation last week that the reason i was getting smiles at the selvedges of my scarves was because the draw-in was causing the selvedges to have a higher end-count than the body of the fabric, and as we know this causes the fabric to smile, as i observed when i made fabrics with varying setts. so with two ends in each dent in the body i put 1 end in each dent on the outside 2 dents. and vast improvements, although not, as you can see, to my photography. or my grammar, for that matter. now i'm in a rush, checking my email in the chippy, but i couldn't get on at the library today or yesterday as they're down. ho hum. i've anyway finsihed the second line of scarves, and am testing out a new finishing technique on monday when the laundrette opens, i'll tell you all about it. if it works out it'll remove all the time i spend twisting ends. lovely -a

So, this is the picture from ebay. i bought this shuttle, and i won't tell you how much i paid for it. it's described as "vintage", which i doubt greatly, and has a "diamond wood" mark on the bottom of it as well as the letters "USA", which gives a clue to it's origin. which is funny, because i bought it from someone in lancashire, which was one of the main areas where the textile industry of britain was concentrated, back in Ye Olde Times. I've looked up Diamond Wood on the internet, and apparently it comes from China and is really rather dense, thus earning it's name. this shuttle however apears to be made of two types of wood, making it a compound shuttle. Genghis Khan conquered half of Eurasia with the compound bow, what can i do with a compound shuttle i wonder? Now, as you may notice, there is no pin for putting the pirn on, which you'd think would be essential. these things usually pivot on a hinge or something and are fixed

Hey i always thought knotted pile would be really time-consuming. and it isn't really at all. i set up a wee test warp on one of my toy looms the other day, and i made a wee thing with strip[es that wasn't that good. so then i made a 40 end warp on my table loom, and got these aren't they nice. and it works up quite quickly as well. that's just me making diagonal stripes into a couple of wee flags. i think i've found my new Fun Thing. hooray! As it goes, Knotted pile is tied for 1st place with Pick Your Nose, and i'm doing that as well, on an occasional basis, so all is well. i think i'll make a wider rug on the floor loom next, and see if i can make circles and curves and that. on second thoughts i should try making curves and circles on the little loom first, before i get all ambitious and buy rakes of wool. on another note, i finished the big warp. made about 33 metres. took about 36 hours, not counting warping. which i didn't count cos it was a farce

That's it. I got an unconditional offer today. hooray! [ trumpets, sirens sound, crowds cheer with wild abandon ] well, that's me all cheered up, despite my sprained neck which has had me in a bad mood all morning. so now i've got 5 months of college left to find something to do with. I could just go and sign on the dole, but that would inevitably lead to waking up in the evening and not getting any weaving done. it's funny isn't it, that when you have all the time in the world it's impossible to get anything done. I guess if the vehicles already moving it doesn't cost much to do an extra 20 miles at the end of the day, or something. I have a table frame in the class room that i can use as a frame loom if i want, so i can either make a tapestry, a knotted pile rug or just work on tablet-woven brocade and double-face effects. If i wanted to be really ambitious i could buy the late Mr Collingwood's Ply-Split book, or the one on Sprang (whatever that is) an

So, I said i was going to try out sectional warping didn't i? Well, we'll get to that. First though, I'd like to show off my pretty new things i made over the new year break. First off is the 6'x3' rug i made for my mother, which she has put on the back of the sofa, this is it sitting in front of a dead fire not being singed by flying cinders. Right, now i'm actually almost furious. That's the third time i've attempted to transfer that rug picture to my mp3 player for upload to blog at college, and the third time i've plugged the thing in to find it mysteriously missing, despite the fact all the other pictures i need are there. It's very aggravating, are the gods of the internet, in their infinite wisdom, preventing me from showing off what is possibly my finest work to date, in case pride comes before a fall? I will prevail, next time, i swear, next time. Never mind, i have also made two pieces on the big loom, warping problems of which have alr

As i haven't remembered to take the pictures of my new rug what i made for in front of my folks's fireplace, and it's new year, and i haven't posted since christmas, and this whole internet thing is rather addictive when you get into it, here are some pictures of cute dogs. i think to myself, in the following manner: "if i know my readership, i'm sure they'll like pictures of cute dogs" well, you didn't ask, but you got anyway on we go. This is Blot, the elegant and handsome prince of Doggy-Kind, he is a gentle, acrobatic and not even remotely clumsy animal without even the slightest hint of youthful enthusiasm. He wants a biscuit, and is probably going to get one This is my little Eris, who i have had for 2 years since she was an ickle-wickle puppy. this is her when she was an ickle puppy, all wrapped up in a shawl on the living room sofa. she's still the only dog in the house that can get away with crawling into bed with my mum. She thinks s